The Toll Gatherer's Day (From "Twice Told Tales") — John Shaqi
The Toll Gatherer's Day (From "Twice Told Tales")Hawthorne, Nathaniel
General
The Toll Gatherer's Day (From "Twice Told Tales")
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Historical fiction, American; New England -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Short stories
Now the sun smiles upon the landscape, and earth smiles back again upon
the sky. Frequent, now, are the travellers. The toll-gatherer's
practised ear can distinguish the weight of every vehicle, the number of
its wheels, and how many horses beat the resounding timbers with their
iron tramp. Here, in a substantial family chaise, setting forth betimes
to take advantage of the dewy road, come a gentleman and his wife, with
their rosy-cheeked little girl sitting gladsomely between them. The
bottom of the chaise is heaped with multifarious bandboxes and carpet-bags,
and beneath the axle swings a leathern trunk dusty with yesterday's
journey. Next appears a four-wheeled carryall, peopled with a round
half-dozen of pretty girls, all drawn by a single horse, and driven by a
single gentleman. Luckless wight, doomed, through a whole summer day,
to be the butt of mirth and mischief among the frolicsome maidens! Bolt
upright in a sulky rides a thin, sour-visaged man, who, as he pays his
toll, hands the toll-gatherer a printed card to stick upon the wall. The
vinegar-faced traveller proves to be a manufacturer of pickles. Now
paces slowly from timber to timber a horseman clad in black, with a
meditative brow, as of one who, whithersoever his steed might bear him,
would still journey through a mist of brooding thought. He is a country
preacher, going to labor at a protracted meeting. The next object
passing townward is a butcher's cart, canopied with its arch of
snow-white cotton. Behind comes a "sauceman," driving a wagon full of new
potatoes, green ears of corn, beets, carrots, turnips, and summer-squashes;
and next, two wrinkled, withered, witch-looking old gossips, in
an antediluvian chaise, drawn by a horse of former generations, and going
to peddle out a lot of huckleberries. See there, a man trundling a
wheelbarrow-load of lobsters. And now a milk-cart rattles briskly
onward, covered with green canvas, and conveying the contributions of a
whole herd of cows, in large tin canisters. But let all these pay their
toll and pass. Here comes a spectacle that causes the old toll-gatherer
to smile benignantly, as if the travellers brought sunshine with them and
lavished its gladsome influence all along the road.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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